Some states process early ballots first, and will report those early in the night, while others save them for last. Here is a breakdown of what to watch for in the pivotal states.

Similarly, in Minnesota, there might be a "red mirage" that misleadingly looks like a Trump lead. Minnesota was one of the closest states Trump lost in 2016, and he hopes to flip it this year, though he is lagging in the polls.

This dynamic is also expected in Texas, Ohio and Iowa, largely for the same reasons. They'll quickly post results from the historic levels of pre-Election Day voting, which likely helps Biden.

In Georgia, some counties will report large chunks of absentee ballots quickly after the polls close, but other counties won't right away. It's unclear exactly how this will shake out on election night.

Additionally, in New Hampshire and Maine, local officials will blend absentee ballots and Election Day ballots before the results are released, eliminating any "shifts." These states favor Biden, but there is a tight race to win one electoral vote in Maine's 2nd Congressional District.

Remember that when he accepted the party's nomination at the 2016 GOP convention, Trump uttered these now-infamous words: "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it."

A majority of Americans neither like Donald Trump personally nor approve of the job he is doing. And the way in which Trump has conducted himself as president as well as the way he has positioned himself in his reelection campaign have made it clear that this is -- and always has been -- about him and him alone.

Except that Trump can't a) stick to the script or b) avoid saying whatever happens to flash through his mind at that very moment. And so, he flips the script to make the exact opposite point that his speechwriter would have wanted: That the election is, in fact, all about him.

Trump offered himself up as the only person able to fix what ails not just Washington, DC, but the country at large.

He has turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality rather than a group of people gathered around a set of shared ideological principles. He has weaponized race for his own political purposes.

Did journalists and local election officials sufficiently prepare the public for red shifts, blue shifts and potential delays?

Were the major networks and The Associated Press able to practice what they preached, a/k/a patience?

Did the pollsters and forecasters get it right? If not, is the polling industry dead for good?

Did "shy Trump" voters materialize?

Can this election help the American media restore a little bit of the trust that's been eroded in recent years?

Will the Trump presidency go down in history as a one-term, one-off fluke or a fundamental realignment of American politics? (Or maybe both?)

Will QAnon adherents realize they were fooled when Trump does not win all 50 states, as a recent Q world narrative has claimed?

Will Fox News viewers feel misled if Biden wins?

Will Trump make a premature claim of victory, and if so how will the major networks handle it?

What will the election results mean for the future of the right-wing media economy?

If Biden wins, for how long after the election will the media uncover more wrongdoing from the Trump admin?

Did the press overcorrect from 2016, and if so in what ways?

My impression, as a reporter who covers the media industry every day, is that some journalists feel like they are limping to the finish line.

Hospitalizations are also surging, with the number of patients nationwide rising by more than 10,000 in just two weeks, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the US reported 9.3 million cases of the virus and more than 232,000 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Researchers from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation project that 399,163 Americans could lose their lives to Covid-19 by February 1.

However, more than 130,000 lives could be saved by March if Americans wore masks, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

For those who are hoping to cast their ballot Tuesday, the CDC told CNN people recovering from Covid-19 or quarantining from being exposed to the virus can still go vote safely

"When possible, alternative voting options -- which minimize contact between voters and poll workers -- should be made available for people with Covid-19, those who have symptoms of Covid-19, and those who have been exposed," the CDC spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, more bad news, this time on Covid-19 cases in children.

There were 61,000 new cases in children during the last week of October, "which is larger than any previous week in the pandemic," the AAP said in a statement. And since the start of the pandemic through October 29, more than 853,000 children have tested positive for the virus, the AAP said. Nearly 200,000 of those cases were during the month of October.

The Democratic presidential nominee has signaled he would rejoin the Paris climate accord, seek to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, give dictators the cold shoulder, treat allies with respect instead of berating them and build a global coalition to counter China's rise. But while Air Force One is nice and all, a 78-year-old President might not be jetting around the world that much.

The European Union is beginning to envision a world not guaranteed by US power. And Russia will make mischief wherever it can.

A Biden presidency might offer more strategic stability and less disruption -- and a steadier hand on the nuclear trigger. But don't expect dominant global leadership in a splintering world.

There will be a few later-night states out West that are worth keeping in mind: Nevada, which Mr. Trump has sought to pull back from the Democrats, and Arizona, which Mr. Biden has been trying to put into the Democratic column.

If Mr. Biden does not win any of those three states (or Texas, where most of the state polls close at 8 p.m.), that will ratchet up the importance of the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump flipped from Democrats in 2016 and where polls show Mr. Biden ahead.

Florida officials have already processed the state’s record-breaking early vote, which has been almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.

Now, with the president expecting no definitive winner on Tuesday night, and his campaign lawyers trying to use state rules to stop the counting of mail-in votes after Election Day, he has no plans to deliver any sort of concession.

. A win in Florida would keep him in the race, but attention would then turn immediately to the Northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

The White House has invited 400 people to the East Room and was planning for everyone attending to be tested for the coronavirus. There was no official invitation sent to many guests invited: The president’s secretary called them to extend the invitation personally. But officials said they expected a lot of attrition and were not certain how many people would show up.

Many people in the president’s circle think he is likely to lose. A brief burst of optimism a few weeks ago has settled into concern about their own careers, post-Trump. Coupled with expectations of large protests around the White House, and the coronavirus, it was not seen by all invitees as the see-and-be-seen event of the year.

Mr. Biden is expected to deliver remarks sometime late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning from Wilmington, Del., but if the result remains in flux he may wait.

Mr. Biden, after a campaign premised largely on the idea of returning to presidential norms, would be stepping far out of character if he too called himself the winner before results were known in enough states.

Control of the Senate is also among the biggest issues being decided Tuesday, with the result going a long way toward determining the contours of the federal government for at least the next two years.

Polling suggests Democrats are favored to pick up seats held by Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona, and lose the one held by Senator Doug Jones of Alabama.The other big tossup contests are in Maine and North Carolina, where the Republican Senators Susan Collins and Thom Tillis face fierce challenges from the Democrats Sara Gideon and Cal Cunningham.

With control of the House unlikely to change, the ability of Democratic candidates for Senate in these states to outrun Mr. Biden may determine the shape of Congress next year.

The first thing to watch for is what the two candidates do if Mr. Biden wins Florida.

If Mr. Trump holds on to Florida, watch out for the lawyers. There are likely to be legal challenges — mainly from Mr. Trump — to early votes cast across the country. Mr. Trump has laid the groundwork with his unfounded warnings about voter fraud and by dispatching lawyers ready to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast. And if Pennsylvania is close, expect that state to be ground zero for legal action that could keep this election unresolved right through Thanksgiving.

Out of “an abundance of caution,” they said, the campaign canceled an event scheduled for later that day at a parking lot belonging to the Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O. in downtown Austin

“Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way,” Tariq Thowfeek, the Texas communications director for the Biden for President campaign, said in a statement.

Efforts to contact the Texas Department of Public Safety to determine the possibility of any law enforcement action also were not immediately successful.

“Anybody see the picture of their crazy bus driving down the highway, they are surrounded by hundreds of cars, they are all Trump flags all over the place,” Mr. Trump said, chuckling.

ut that’s a veritable rom-com next to the horror show of 2020, whose full terrors took shape after Biden committed to his presidential bid. He knew going in that Trump would fight dirty, exit messy and bequeath an even more toxic political environment than he inherited. He couldn’t foresee the breadth and depth of America’s hurt right now.

Knowing that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, Trump falsely claimed (again) that ballots received after Election Day, even if they’re in perfect accordance with a state’s requirement of a postmark by Election Day, are illegitimate. He applauded supporters of his who swarmed around and trapped a Biden-Harris campaign bus.

Biden would also confront a restive crew in his own party. If Democrats controlled the Senate, their fury during Trump’s presidency would transform into an insistence on any or all of the following: sweeping action to address climate change; sweeping action to expand health insurance; the sweeping aside of the filibuster; the expansion of the Supreme Court; an immigration overhaul; the placement of high-profile progressives in high-profile cabinet slots; the destruction of what stretches of the border wall Trump managed to construct; and the investigation and even prosecution of his henchmen.

But if Trump is ousted, the glue dissolves, laying bare the distance between Biden and many younger Democrats.

But it’s not just American politics that’s in disarray. It’s our whole information ecosystem. Trump’s presidency fortified the alternate realities that Americans live in, the contradictory sets of facts that they accept and the competing truths that they tell

They had a deep, granular knowledge of their community that couldn’t be bought, and they were using it to find every one of their neighbors who might be open to voting Democratic.

Similar shifts are happening all over America, as abhorrence toward Trump has sparked an explosion of organizing among women. However Tuesday turns out, this mobilization has rapidly altered Georgia’s politics, helping to turn a Republican redoubt into a competitive purple state.

As I write this, FiveThirtyEight’s polling average shows Biden slightly favored to win Georgia.

Ossoff is now a Senate candidate, running about even with the incumbent Republican, David Perdue. That race is expected to go to a runoff, as is the one that the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, a Democrat, is waging for the state’s other Senate seat. Georgia’s Seventh District, where Carolyn Bourdeaux is running again after a narrow loss in 2018, is now rated by Cook as “lean Democratic.”

“No matter what happens next week, Georgia has changed forever,” said Sarah Riggs Amico, who was Stacey Abrams’s running mate when Abrams ran for governor in 2018.

I never in a million years thought I would be this engrossed and involved in politics at 48 years old,” she said. No one Landsman knew had stepped back from politics, and new volunteers were surging in.

It may not be enough, but if Trump loses, it will be because of the women who wrung themselves out to defeat him. I asked Amico how she’s sleeping in these final days. “I’m not sleeping very much,” she said. “But when I sleep I sleep quite soundly.”

After Barack Obama won Pinellas County by hefty margins in 2008 and 2012, Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast.

Mr. Biden’s gathering was socially distanced and focused on the death toll from the coronavirus, while Mr. Trump’s took no such precautions and repeated unsubstantiated claims about the business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter in Ukraine.

“Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”

At the rally, speakers mainly focused on what they said were efforts to block voters from casting ballots this year — and how to combat them. Those efforts included one by Florida Republicans, who sidestepped a statewide referendum to extend the franchise to former felons by requiring them to pay court fees. One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.

“I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles.

e could prevail next week

A Biden win would doom Mr. Trump’s chances for re-election. More significantly, it would herald the arrival of a formidable multiracial Democratic coalition in the country’s largest red state. That would hand the Democrats an electoral upper hand nationwide and all but block Republicans from the White House until they improve their fortunes with college-educated white voters, younger people and minorities.

Yet even as leading figures in both parties urge their respective presidential nominees to take Texas seriously, the campaigns are still reluctant to spend precious remaining time and money there.

Though the state isn’t essential to a Biden victory, Democrats have been more aggressive here. Mr. Biden is dispatching his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to Texas on Friday, and Democrats have also planned a multicity bus tour across the state.

Texas Republicans and Democrats alike believe the long-awaited m

The pandemic has slowed the Texas economy, the top selling point for its politicians

With two days left of early voting, turnout in Texas has nearly exceeded the total number of votes cast in the state in the 2016 election. Voters under 30 have showed up in historic numbers, with over 904,000 of them already casting ballots (only 1.1 million such young Texans voted in all of 2016).

“It is a competitive state, meaning a Democrat can now win statewide,” acknowledged Steve Munisteri, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, noting that about 10 million people had moved to the state in the last 20 years. “We’ve had the equivalent of two medium-sized states move in.”

In border communities like Brownsville and McAllen, the question for Mr. Biden is not whether voters will support a Democrat — they do so reliably — but whether voters in this working-class region hit hard by the coronavirus will turn out at the same levels as the more affluent parts of the state.

Visits to a pair of precincts last week in the Rio Grande Valley revealed a noticeable number of first- or second-time voters, including many students. Many of them were Hispanic and they cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden — or, as they put it, against Mr. Trump.

If Mr. Biden can significantly expand beyond the 54 percent of the vote Hillary Clinton garnered there in 2016, the gain in raw votes in such a highly populated community could draw him close to Mr. Trump statewide.

“I think most of the young generation is for Biden,” explained Brian Nguyen, a 20-year-old college student, after he voted.

“Texas is changing,” said Mr. Cruz. “We’re not home to just oil and gas wildcatters.”

In most of the states where polls show Mr. Trump leading, they also show the GOP senate candidate leading

Likewise, where polls show former Vice President Joe Biden in front, they show the Democratic Senate candidate in front

In 2016, Mr. Trump won votes from 51% of men but only 40% of women—an 11-point gender gap that tied the record Bill Clinton set in his re-election of 1996.

With strong economic numbers to tout today, Mr. Trump will surely be banking on the economy to boost his campaign—and to narrow what could be a historic gender gap

Historically the U.S. sought rules and institutions like the WTO that apply equally to everyone. Under Mr. Trump, the U.S. now crafts its own rules, as it has with China, according to what it considers its own best interest.

USTR says up to 90% of cases against the U.S. have led to a finding that some U.S. law or measure violated WTO commitments. True, the U.S. brings lots of WTO cases and wins the vast majority, but what Mr. Lighthizer focuses on is that the U.S. is sued more often than anyone else despite having among the world’s lowest trade barriers.

The WTO’s Appellate Body tilted the rules further in China’s favor—for example, by making it difficult to punish anticompetitive subsidies that come via state-owned enterprises, which dominate China’s economy.

the prior policy of trying to change China through engagement didn’t work

Mr. Trump’s actions may make U.S. allies more, not less, willing to work with it on China. Perhaps the strongest defense of Mr. Lighthizer’s approach to managing China is that it beats the status quo. He said: “The fact that it’s complicated is not a reason not to try to do it. And even if you have a little extra inefficiency in the system, it’s still worth it because the way we [had] it is absolutely crazy. It’s destined to fail.”

Larry Kudlow, the top White House economic adviser, on a campaign call with reporters Thursday said Mr. Biden would jeopardize that growth with his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy, and vowed that the Trump administration would take a “targeted approach” to rising coronavirus cases that would rely on wearing masks and social distancing. Mr. Trump has urged neither at the dozen rallies he has held in the past six days.

“Millions of people out there are out of work, on the edge, can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. And Donald Trump has given up,”

The Wall Street Journal’s October survey of economists found that more than half of respondents don’t expect GDP will return to its pre-pandemic level until next year and that the economy will contract 3.6% this year, measured from the fourth quarter of 2019.

Thirty-nine states, and the District of Columbia, have already topped 2016 early-voting levels.

“If you lost $100 and then got back $65, would you feel well off? That’s what today’s GDP number means,” tweeted Steven Rattner, a Democratic financier and former Obama administration official

Heading into the 2020 campaign, Mr. Trump expected the booming economy to be the centerpiece of his re-election effort, with the economy one of the few issues where he has consistently outpaced Mr. Biden in polling

Americans have since ramped up spending on everything from home improvements to bicycles with the help of stimulus checks sent to millions, though overall expenditures remain below pre-pandemic levels.

A nationwide decline in combined state revenue has happened after only two events in 90 years: following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. economy has steadily recovered since the spring, and more than 11 million jobs of the 22 million lost earlier in the year have come back. Still, the unemployment rate recently hovered at 7.9%, and there has been an uptick in permanent layoffs.

Economists warn a two-track recovery is emerging, with well-educated and well-off people and some businesses prospering, at the same time lower-wage workers with fewer credentials, old-line businesses and regions tied to tourism are mired in a deep decline.

After 2008, some states implemented or added to rainy day funds—cash reserves that can be used to fill revenue gaps caused by a potential shock

School systems also usually receive local funds through property taxes.

Schools received federal aid from the pandemic-stimulus packages passed by Congress earlier this year.

The money was quickly spent

The Ohio Education Association, a teachers union, said the state’s school districts could face budget shortfalls for the 2022 and 2023 budget years of between 20% and 25%.

Many states are pleading for more aid from Congress, which has so far sent money in its coronavirus relief packages to deal with the health crisis but not to offset revenue losses.

Congress has doled out about $150 billion in Covid-19 response dollars to state and local governments, plus some additional money to cover elevated Medicaid costs.

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they don’t want Covid-19 aid used to address longstanding financial problems.

Community Health Resources, which offers mental-health and addiction services to 27,000 children and adults, is concerned it won’t receive its expected more than $40 million in state funding—62% of the organization’s annual budget—in the next fiscal year, which begins in July.

States usually have their own rules for what is acceptable at polling places

More than 73 million ballots have been cast as of Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, in an unprecedented influx of early balloting. Many of those early votes are mail ballots as voters seek alternatives to going to polling sites during the coronavirus pandemic.

Many Democrats and some former Trump administration officials have criticized President Trump’s comments about potential vote rigging and his repeated remarks about the threat of far-left violence as contributing to the charged atmosphere.

Perhaps nothing underscores how acute and unexpected the budget situation is for Mr. Trump as much as his television ad budget. His cash on hand entering October was $40 million less than the $104.4 million he had previously reserved in television ads for the final five weeks, according to Advertising Analytics data

Over all, the data show Mr. Trump’s TV ad spending has shrunk by $23 million since Sept. 20. In that same time period, Mr. Biden has expanded his reservations by $99 million.

Mr. Trump’s campaign is not broke. The $63.1 million he had on hand entering October is nearly what Mrs. Clinton had four years ago. The campaign said no loans or deferrals had occurred this time. The problem is that his campaign initially presumed it would have far more money, and Bill Stepien, who replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager over the summer, has spent recent months imposing cost-control measures to prevent a bigger shortfall.

Before the pandemic, air quality in the U.S. was worsening for the first time in years

Biden wants to fund renewable energy development and ban new oil and gas permits on public lands

Biden would rejoin the agreement. He has a $2 trillion plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050

Biden wants to restore Obama-era regulations, increase spending on water treatment and water pipeline repairs, and prosecute companies that pollute.

“Trump is still the political outsider, while Biden is the ultimate insider,” Mr. Murtaugh said.

Mr. Trump is publicly optimistic, but privately appears aware that he is trailing in the race, people familiar with the matter said.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken in the days after the first debate, but before Mr. Trump tested positive, found that Mr. Biden’s lead over the president had grown to 14 points from 8 in September, with voters by a 2-to-1 margin saying Mr. Biden had outperformed Mr. Trump in the debate.

“We had a superspreader event in the White House, and it was in a situation where people were crowded together and were not wearing masks,” Dr. Fauci said in an Oct. 9 CBS News Radio interview.

Mr. Trump eschewed traditional practice debate sessions in favor of more informal discussions with his team, advisers said. At one point during practice, he asked the group, “Why are you guys in here? Why aren’t you out there defending me on TV?”

Mr. Trump told aides afterwards that he blamed Mr. Wallace for his own interruptions. His performance stunned advisers, one of whom later described the president’s performance as “one of the most incredible self-inflicted wounds of all time.”